Name One Black African Cartoon Series

'Transformers', 'Voltron', 'Super Ted', 'Fun Factory', 'Thundercats', 'Battle of the Planets', the list goes on.Most of us adults who grew up in Africa remember watching those programs when we were children. Those programs helped teach us everything from arithmetic and English, right through to we could defeat a very powerful decepticon robot in case the need arose. In fact, programs such as Sesame Street taught us general life skills.

Now fast forward a few years. You now have your own young family and you want to watch cartoons with your young children. The current crop of cartoons such as Dora the Explorer and Peppa Pig are great. But what if you want to watch a cartoon or animation that reflects some part of your black and African heritage? How about one that's available in major African languages so children can learn their mother tongue? Can you name one truly international children's program that was conceived and produced in Africa? It's difficult right?

This leads us to the next question. Why? There are many reasons for this.

These include;

Lack of financial support from the public and private sectors: Banks for example, see animation as a risky venture. In fact in countries like Nigeria banks have traditionally steered clear from supporting the entertainment sector with financial products. They are now talking with the creative sector to see how they can collaborate in the future. Also institutions like the World Bank have pledged funds to help industries such as Nigeria's Nollywood so things are looking up. As animation is a sub sector of this, there should be a trickledown effect in the future.
Lack of support and belief from local broadcasters: Many television networks don't commission such programs. In fact they prefer to import foreign children cartoons. To some degree this situation is understandable.
Lack of artists and technicians in fields such as animation production.
Lack of support from government: In some countries such as France, companies that produce animations are given encouragement in the form of incentives and funding. Unfortunately this isn't the case in the majority of African countries.

So it is easy to see why there are no cartoon series from Africa that have had global success. However, African animators have decided to tackle this challenge head on. In regions as diverse as Kenya, Nigeria, Egypt, South Africa and in Diaspora things are changing. Using the internet and new digital production technologies, African artists and companies are producing their own content for the world to see. The future for African animation is very bright.

Adamu Waziri is a lover of all things animation. As is common with most animators, he was drawing comics and cartoons from a young age. An architect originally, he further trained and worked as a 3D animator in London. He proceeded to set up EVCL http://www.evcl.tv/, a creative studio in Abuja Nigeria. EVCL is now producing a new children's series called Bino and Fino http://binoandfino.wordpress.com/.